Outside of fringe gun owners, who really thinks this is helping anyone or any cause? It’s much more likely that it only shows gun extremists to be more extreme and out of touch with the bulk of Americans who find this kind of behavior either scary or offensive. Maybe the owner feels inadequate in some way, so this helps him feel like a bigger man? If gun activists want to help discredit their precious cause, they should keep doing this.

As a person who has traveled a number of times to Israel where you do see (or at least, used to see) soldiers going home on weekend leave with their guns, it just doesn’t give me any level of comfort seeing this guy with a gun over his shoulder. Oh, and if there were another gun nut in the store preparing to open fire, guess who he’d take out first?

How would I know this guy is not a crazy gun preparing to kill people and really, why would the local police take him on his word? Have the police never heard of Meleanie Hain, the open -carry soccer mom that was killed by her open-carry husband, who then killed himself?

Chris in Paris
An American in Paris, France. BA in History & Political Science from Ohio State. Provided consulting services to US software startups, launching new business overseas that have both IPO’d and sold to well-known global software companies. Currently launching a new cloud-based startup. Full bio here.

He was making the point that its perfectly legal and shouldnt be offensive to simply display a weapon in public. What is offensive is people who think guns are the problem and demonize those who would carry concealed or open. The irony is that the author doesn’t get that we are all targets to criminals. The acknowledgement of the fact that guns exist and should be normalized as tools and respected as necessary is not extreme, even if it is sadly “fringe ” behavior. It shows the ignorance of the majority who holds that anyone with a gun is suspect unless they support the Authoritarian State. Mere plebeians like this guy showing their awareness of the reality of violence in the world are seen as threats to the mirage of law and order , and an affront to the illusion of a civil society, when they should be the norm and not marginalized as in the formative years of this country

He was making the point that its perfectly legal and should be offensive to simply display a weapon in public. What is offensive is people who think guns are the problem and demonize those who would carry concealed or open. The irony is that the author doesn’t get that we are all targets to criminals. The acknowledgement of the fact that guns exist and should be normalized as tools and respected as necessary is not extreme, even if it is sadly “fringe ” behavior. It shows the ignorance of the majority who holds that anyone with a gun is suspect unless they support the Authoritarian State. Mere plebeians like this guy showing their awareness of the reality of violence in the world are seen as threats to the mirage of law and order , and an affront to the illusion of a civil society, when they should be the norm and not marginalized as in the formative years of this country.

You are clueless about why it was and is legal to carry weapons in public. Uninformed about civil rights as it relates to the means of coercion and the power the State assumes it has but doesn’t have to regulate it , and why

“Outside of fringe gun owners, who really thinks this is helping anyone or any cause?”

I see a photo with a man carrying firearms, threatening no one, and other people around him who don’t seem to be carrying. It doesn’t look like anyone is screaming or running away in terror. And as the reporter said, he’s done this before. So it seems he made his point: peaceful people own and carry guns. Of course it’s controversial and many people will dislike it. He wouldn’t have done it were it not controversial to do. Does it help his cause? You betcha. Here’s a peaceful member of society who carries firearms, serving as a stark counter-example to the news headlines about the occasional lunatic who goes on a shooting spree. Now these people have seen someone with an “assault rifle” going about his ordinary life in the same manner as every other person there. Now when they think of people who have assault rifles, they can think of someone other than the wild-eyed killers whose faces are endlessly displayed on the 24/7 news networks.

“Maybe the owner feels inadequate in some way, so this helps him feel like a bigger man?”

No, probably not.

“If gun activists want to help discredit their precious cause, they should keep doing this.”

It is being done with increasing frequency, and it hasn’t discredited them. How would hiding their guns at home be a credit to their argument, anyway?

“How would I know this guy is not a crazy gun preparing to kill people and really, why would the local police take him on his word?”

The same way you know this about anyone: He’s not doing anything threatening. He made no threats to anyone, verbally or otherwise. He attacked no one. If he were planning to kill people, why would he broadcast it before he could attempt it? Criminals hide their intentions until they’re ready to act on them. This man wasn’t hiding anything.

“Have the police never heard of Meleanie Hain, the open -carry soccer mom that was killed by her open-carry husband, who then killed himself?”

She was shot in the back, while at home while she was sitting in front of her computer, by her husband… a cop. So what does that have to do with open carry, aside from the fact that this woman had openly carried at times in the past? Her gun wasn’t even in the same room.

“None of these open carry zealots make me feel safer.”

Out of sight, out of mind? Are you more afraid of the guns you can see, or the guns you can’t see?
Do you think the anti-self-defense zealots make the open carriers feel safer?

By civilized countries do you mean ones like England that has more crime than the U.S, but it’s subjects are disarmed so instead of more gun crimes “Not that criminals there don’t use guns in crimes too”, but instead use other weapons like hammers, baseball bats, etc more often? Notice you said less gun crime, well how can it be less gun crime? Wasn’t England’s subjects disarmed decades ago? Do you mean to tell me that in spite of this some criminals still have access to guns to commit crimes with? Looks like all a gun ban does to me is, disarm law abiding citizens and cause some criminals to use baseball bats instead, and other blunt objects, but it don’t stop crime, and it never will. It won’t ever stop killings either. In England crimes happen regularly in broad daylight, because criminals know everyone is disarmed, so thy don’t care if you are even home while they rob you, is that what you want for us here in the U.S too?

You are putting up a straw man argument that won’t fly. Most guns, and this especially goes for Semi Auto style Assault type looking weapons, have killed nothing but paper. Do you want us to just use them for what they were designed for, you sure? Ban them, and your wish will come true.

I’ll answer the questions you asked answered:

(1) We arm our Military with guns instead of hammers for the same reason we don’t all CCW a hammer, a Rifle is more effective at a longer distance. As to would I rather the guy have a gun than a hammer if I was in a fight with him, well that depends on distance. Up close inside 12 feet I would rather he had a rifle in his hands.

(2) The utility of the Assault Rifle or any magazine feed High Capacity style rifle also outweighs any negative impacts. You got your opinion, and I got mine.If I am ever anywhere where a mass shooting is happening, I sure as hell would want an assault rifle in my hand too. People t those events didn’t die because of what ever gun the perp had in his hands, they died because they gave up Liberty for a false sense of perceived safety, and didn’t protect themselves properly as per the Second Amendment. I know, I know, the Cops will protect us right? Well let me know how that works out for you, hopefully better than it has at all th other mass shootings for those people. Had they been armed to begin with, there wouldn’t of been a mass shooting. Yea, I want my hunting Shotgun, I also want my hunting rifles, my handguns, and my fighting arms, and I will keep all f them till death, thank you.

(3) You want to ban assault styled rifles, well good luck with that. I’m not going to name all the people that have proposed banning Assault style rifles, one will do, Barack Hussein Obama. Do your own research, there are plenty out there proposing this.

(4) Doesn’t matter weather we would like to subject ourselves to rules about driving a car or not, we all are already subjected to them, same for all the gun laws we already have, what is the question? There already are thousands of gun laws on the books, criminals don’t follow gun laws, law abiding gun owners do, and they are not the problem.

So when you see a Cop with his big bad Glock strapped to his side does that panic you too? I’m sure when you Parents conceived you they had no intentions of having a Son who was such a scared girl either, but what is your point, If seeing someone buying something with a gun strapped to their back or securely in their holster scares and panics you, then maybe you should grow some nuts and stop being paranoid all the time. Stay out of the military too, they all got guns.

Maybe to you, but most people with brains understand it just fine. You can’t just shoot someone because you are a pussy and scared of things you don’t understand. Now if the guy has a gun and threatens you, and goes to point it at you while doing so, then yea, then you would be justified killing him, but nobody has to worry about that from you do we? You are scared of guns and don’t own one, it’s obvious.

Ballistics and gun knowledge are two very different beasts. My knowledge on guns is not all inclusive, but it is sufficient. I am a combat veteran whose focus was combat arms. My specialty was heavy weapons. I have shot just about every weapon a soldier uses. I qualified gold in the German Expert Infantry test which required expert handling of their weapons which I was unfamiliar with.

My best friend was the armorer and I learned my fair share of high level weapons maintenance from one of the best armorers in our nation.

So did you have a question that is about guns or were you once again trying to be argumentative?

EDIT: On the subject of ballistics, I know general ballistics. Mainly my knowledge of ballistics was restricted to the weapons I used and as I have not had much direct need for understanding ballistics recently I have forgotten much of my knowledge on the subject. I can list off the generic ballistic properties of the rounds fired from each of the weapons I mentioned, but do I really need to whip mine out to show you whose is bigger?

Thank you for your statements Ibmiel. To be honest, I am one of those that believed you to be male, but it is refreshing to hear a female point of view that is not simply, “I hate guns because they are loud.”

Thank you for also taking time to clarify my statistic. Based on my estimates I figured I was actually higher than the truth. I was actually hoping one of my opponents on this matter would have done the research to solidify the statistic, which is why I had mentioned the statistic to be an estimate. I hoped that in the process of trying to prove me wrong that I might have influenced someone into a shocking revelation about assault rifles.

It goes without saying, or maybe it isn’t actually said enough by the gun owners, but we can all agree that the taking of innocent life in any amount is unacceptable. As with our medical system, the focus seems to be on treating the symptom and not the cause.

The gun by no means is the cause of violence as displayed by the multitude of countries that have a much higher per capita violent crime rate and no guns. The gun is the tool used. Does it make it easier to commit violence at scale? Yes. Is it the only means to commit violence at scale? No.

Sadly, the uneducated sector that blanket sides with the ‘left’ (generic statement I know, but it is hard to deny that the vast majority of anti-gun people side to the left and I am referring to uneducated as those that take all information from the media instead of real research), is having a knee jerk reaction. Two recent shootings had assault rifles used and the media, also primarily left minded, has sensationalized the usage of the assault rifle. If anyone wants to deny that the media is primarily left minded then just think of the sole media outlet that has employed every last one of the people you blanket hate for being Republican. One outlet on the national scale for the right and the rest for the left and I apologize for getting off topic.

The point is that there is plenty we can and should do to help prevent violence of all types. The weapon of choice is not the problem. The problem is the whatever the root cause for people not being able to cope with situations with other means than violence. Does that mean do nothing in relation to guns? No. That means making decisions about guns based on real facts and justifying the decisions made with some sort of logic. Still, not a single person has explained how an assault rifle and 30-round magazine ban will make anyone safer.

The argument is made, as the only justification to an assault rifle ban, that there is no need for me to own an assault rifle. I say that isn’t justification at all. There are many luxuries that we have in life that are not needed. Personally I used an assault rifle in war. I enjoy shooting guns of all types. It is therapeutic to me as a hobby. I don’t presume that my right to a therapeutic hobby is paramount or more important than the right to the safety of others, but at the same time the statistics on gun violence, the real statistics from unbiased collections, don’t lie.

Rifles and shotguns account for 3% of the violence. For all the screaming about assault rifles and how much more dangerous they are than the other guns that aren’t targeted it is rather amazing that anyone can rationalize that the assault rifle needs banned with those numbers. Then again, the people that are screaming for the ban have either neglected to do any research at all or are so against guns that they have intentionally disregarded the facts.

So what is the solution one might ask? That is a very loaded question (pun intended). First, gun education. Whether a person likes guns or not, to be involved in the decision making they must be educated on the topic at hand. Better mental health options in the country may help, but once again I would point out that the vast majority of shootings have nothing to do with mental health to begin with.

Perhaps letting the CDC do more research, but under strict supervision. The reason the CDC has been prevented from doing the research is because the last time they did research into gun violence they nearly destroyed their reputation through biased fact collections and pushing a clear anti-gun agenda. The CDC is not a platform for the anti-gun crowd to use to push their agenda. Blame the Republicans and the NRA all you want for putting a stop to the CDC, but if you actually look at it from an unbiased place you will see that the measures taken to stop the CDC actually saved the CDC.

The number one solution in my book? Hold the media and politicians responsible for the lies that they continue to spew. The media sensationalizes based on false information. 20 years ago that was not allowed. I remember Connie Chung losing her entire career for using a source that was later found to be lying. That wasn’t even intentional, but she was held accountable. What has happened to that?

The President released a proposal on gun control. That proposal is filled with false statistics. We need to demand more. The ends do not justify the means and even if some people believe they do, we didn’t elect a President with the theory that he will only tell the truth when he decides that the truth supports his agenda. Pushing his gun control proposal with the false information in it is a travesty and he should be ashamed that he would compromise the trust we have in the Office of the President in such a manner.

Until both sides are willing to debate using real information instead of what we have been seeing recently, then sadly there is nothing we can do. False information leads to false solutions. False solutions lead to wasted time and money, not to mention no impact on the loss of life. Is that what we really want?

You’d think you’d want us to compare more favorably with *safe* and fully developed countries, not countries that are or were a part of the third world until recently. (Brazil is developing quick, but its development is uneven and far from complete.)

What all of these countries actually have in common, including our own, is the black market drug trade that we’ve propagated from the policies we’ve created in the decades of our ludicrous “Drug War.”

A huge swath of the murders in our country come from gang violence in inner cities — thousands of deaths a year — but you’re right, that violence pales in comparison to the violence we’ve created in other countries.

Yet, that Venezuela, Colombia and other countries in that region may have higher levels of gun violence per capita than us, that’s not a defense of our country’s policies. It’s an indictment of it.

A lot of people may not want to include it, but our “Drug War” absolutely has to be a part of the conversation of gun violence in this country and elsewhere, because that’s the cause of so much of it, the disease causing a lot of other symptoms.

Ignoring decades of rational arguments and oodles of facts and figures by creating a straw man is not a rational argument, either. I agree, dismissing the manhood of these dudes isn’t a particularly great argument, but it’s a perfectly reasonable expression of frustration given the gun nuts’ propensity to ignore facts and reality, or utterly disregard them for their own selfish reasons.

To be perfectly honest, I’d rather nuts like these carry guns around like the maniacs that they are, than try to hide their mania behind a concealed license. That way, if I’m at that mall and there’s a nut walking around with a gun slung over their shoulder, I can very quickly make my exit.

All that said, there’s no reason for a gun like that to exist in the hands of a civilian population.

Criminals shouldn’t have guns and sadly normal people with guns are more likely to commit suicide or accidentally shoot a loved one. If you are carrying a gun you will much more likely to perceive the other person as holding a weapon, instead of whatever was in their hand. Guns give people the illusion of safety, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t own any guns myself, but my family is a different story. Military and law enforcement run rampant in my family. I can got into their homes and find rifles, shotguns and handguns, but for some reason never the tool kit. Here’s some good advice for you, if mugged surrender your wallet, don’t make eye contact. You will never get your gun out before they shoot you. Advice given to my by a relative who used to be a deputy. Don’t matter if your are nuts, drunk, angry, suicidal, homicidal, depressed, careless, scared or whatever, when you have a gun you can make life altering decisions. A vid for all the LEOs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XiYUYcpsT4 Bob Marley – I Shot The Sheriff

Hi Michael, I’ve been reading all the comments, you are very intelligent and compose your rebuttals very well. I did do research, it’s closer to 3% for rifles and shotguns together. For the last 5 years shotgun deaths were higher than rifle except for 2010 rifles were 367 shotguns 366. From the 62 mass shootings since 1982 there have been 988 injured, out of those injured, 513 died. That is for the last 30 years, statistically that is very small, but that doesn’t make it acceptable or mean we shouldn’t look for ways to reduce those numbers. One way I know won’t work is by banning guns and ammunition. I’ve done enough research to realize that. Britain is held up as example of a gun ban working. It’s true that their gun violence/murder is extremely low, but the total violent crime rate is more than 3 times ours. Britain 2034/100000 U.S. 466/100000. The article is from 2009. When people say if you take guns away the criminal will just use another weapon they are right. Contrary to what the posters in this thread have assumed, I am female, I don’t own a gun, never shot or even held one. I know they are a tool, a very effective tool, used to save and defend people; also a very effective tool to kill people. It’s very hard for me to comprehend people not understanding that the weapon isn’t to blame. I have also been very surprised at the vehemence expressed on both sides. The name calling, the threats, just the vitriol being spewed. The hatred for the NRA, I have no background in guns, so I have no idea what they’ve done that is so awful. When I started checking this, I discovered that the guns they want to ban are not the mass killing weapons they are held out to be.

The law was loosened for some, Jews and other classes were prohibited from owning guns.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book
basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions
completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and
shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more
categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from
gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase
was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one
year to three years.The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general.

The author’s last sentence is very interesting – he says just because hitler kept the jews and others from owning guns doesn’t mean gun control is bad. No, of course not, the fact that he massacred them after keeping them from owning guns is pure coincidence.

I believe that Saddam was a dictator and Iraq didn’t have a constitution. As a dictator he made people do what he wanted by force. There were no rights for the people – quite different from our republic. States all over the country are preparing or have passed state laws against new gun control and sheriffs all over are letting people know that they won’t enforce a federal ban or assist government agents in doing so. The people aren’t at the mercy of a corrupt government like many other countries are.

You’re making a couple of assumptions with your statement that is simply not borne out by the facts. A rampaging gunman who sees or is confronted by an armed bystander does not stand there having a shoot out. When there is someone else on the scene with a gun, they leave. Clackamas mall shooting – a shopper heard gunshots, drew his weapon, approached the gunman. The shopper saw bystanders behind the shooter and did NOT shoot, he moved off into a store. After the gunman was approached by the shopper he moved off and shot himself. That is what most shooters do when there is another armed person on the scene. These shooters are cowards, they want to be the only armed person there. People use their guns in defense of themselves and others all the time.

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime
drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later,
it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control
laws: despite all the attacks by gun-control advocates, no one has ever
been able to refute Lott’s simple, startling conclusion that more guns
mean less crime. Relying on the most rigorously comprehensive data
analysis ever conducted on crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the
book directly challenges common perceptions about the relationship of
guns, crime, and violence. For this third edition, Lott draws on an
additional ten years of data—including provocative analysis of the
effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, D.C—that brings the book
fully up to date and further bolsters its central contention.

Perhaps you could enlighten me as to what a, lets say mathematical apparatus, has to do with my reasoning there? I am truly intrigued as I am not seeing the link (no pun intended).

I figured you would be happy that someone you were debating with was actually willing to state you are correct and that the initial blanket statement I made may not have applied to the entirety of the initial statement.

I would like clarification though. If I disagree with you then I am wrong, but when I agree with you I am wrong as well? If that is the case, then logically that means your statement was wrong to begin with. I am not thinking that is what you were going for, but in the end that is the way it is.

That seems to be the same mentality as the anti-gun folks. For years they have screamed about a link between video games and violence. The NRA says it and they are absolutely wrong and chastised for saying it. Two weeks later, the anti-gun crew is saying it again while still chastising the NRA for saying it. Perhaps you can tell me how that makes sense.

Chaos is structured random behavior of a non-linear, complex, dynamical system. The behavior over long-time scales is (1) unpredictable, (2) seemingly random but not arbitrarily so, (3) sensitive to initial conditions, and (4) characterized by a strange attractor that is often a fractal. Chaotic behavior is different from random behavior in that it is not completely random and the strange attractor governs its structure.

That doesn’t really refute that most accidents happen due to some sort of negligence. If you would like to apply that to car accidents, or house fires, or any other sort of accident then it would also encompass accidental weapon discharges.

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary wildly, depending on the study’s population, criteria, time-period studied, and other factors. Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz cite between 1 to 2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year.[1]:64-65[2][3] Low end estimates by Hemenway cite approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[4][5] Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.[1]:65[6] The basis for the studies, the National Self-Defense Survey and the National Crime Victimization Survey, vary in their methods, time-frames covered, and questions asked.[7]

Media under-reporting

Researcher John Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that media coverage of defensive gun use is rare, noting that in general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police”.

Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that “national surveys” suggested that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” In that same paragraph he also wrote that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses
are never even reported to the police.” The higher the rate of defensive gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the media without reference to media bias. Lott cited the figure frequently in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal[8] and the Los Angeles Times.[9]

In 2002, he repeated the study, and reported that brandishing a weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other researchers criticized his methodology, saying that his sample size of 1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80 percent.[10] Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.[11] Lott explained the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.[12] The other surveys all asked people to recall events over the previous five years, while Lott had only asked people about events that had
occurred during just the previous year.

Estimates over the number of defensive gun uses vary wildly,
depending on the study’s population, criteria, time-period studied, and
other factors. Higher end estimates by Kleck and Gertz cite between 1 to
2.5 million DGUs in the United States each year.[1]:64-65[2][3] Low end estimates by Hemenway cite approximately 55,000-80,000 such uses each year.[4][5] Middle estimates have estimated approximately 1 million DGU incidents in the United States.[1]:65[6] The basis for the studies, the National Self-Defense Survey and the National Crime Victimization Survey, vary in their methods, time-frames covered, and questions asked.[7]

Media under-reporting

Researcher John Lott argues in both More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns that media coverage of defensive gun use is rare, noting that in
general, only shootings ending in fatalities are discussed in news
stories. In More Guns, Less Crime, Lott writes that “[s]ince in
many defensive cases a handgun is simply brandished, and no one is
harmed, many defensive uses are never even reported to the police”.

Attempting to quantify this phenomenon, in the first edition of the
book, published in May 1998, Lott wrote that “national surveys”
suggested that “98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively,
they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.” In that
same paragraph he also wrote that “[s]ince in many defensive cases a
handgun is simply brandished, and no one is harmed, many defensive uses
are never even reported to the police.” The higher the rate of defensive
gun uses that do not end in the attacker being killed or wounded, the
easier it is to explain why defensive gun uses are not covered by the
media without reference to media bias. Lott cited the figure frequently
in the media, including publications like the Wall Street Journal[8] and the Los Angeles Times.[9]

In 2002, he repeated the study, and reported that brandishing a
weapon was sufficient to stop an attack 95% of the time. Other
researchers criticized his methodology, saying that his sample size of
1,015 respondents was too small for the study to be accurate and that
the majority of similar studies suggest a value between 70 and 80
percent.[10] Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz’s 1994 estimate rises to 92 percent when brandishing and warning shots are added together.[11] Lott explained the lower rates found by others was at least in part due to the different questions that were asked.[12] The other surveys all asked people to recall events over the previous
five years, while Lott had only asked people about events that had
occurred during just the previous year.

I never claimed to be an expert on global warming. Let’s just get that one knocked out. As to the rest of your statements, it has become apparent that unless I write a novel to you that you will bash with no actual intent to do anything other than bash.

I can overcomplicate this discussion in ways that would astound you, but that wouldn’t change or solve anything. I don’t need to make attempts to sound extremely intelligent and all knowing to prop myself up in this discussion.

You have made assumption after assumption about me. Frankly I grow weary of spending energy trying to get you on topic. You have not successfully proven anything I have said wrong. You sure talked a lot, but I see no sources to support a single one of the statements about global warming that you have made.

I was having a generic conversation in relation to this matter. Mostly it was a non-scientific discussion in the sense that I wasn’t using sources. You have proved my point about theory over and over again. The point, if you remember, is that theory is not absolute fact and that the full concept of global warming does not stand up to scrutiny. It doesn’t. You have not shown it does. By your own definition of scientific theory, global warming doesn’t stand up. Certain portions of the theory have merit, but the concept as a whole comes to conclusions that have not been proven and those conclusions continue to change. Changing conclusions in a theory based on both new information and conclusions from old information being disproven is not a fallacy.

In the end, I think we are debating two very different things here. You are debating scientific terms and I am debating the conclusions that are being drawn by the theories that encompass global warming. If you would like to debate global warming with me then do so, but you are not debating that. You are just attacking me instead of making relevant talking points.

Once again I would point out that debates in writing creates issues at times. While you are thinking I am falling prey to a multitude of fallacies and lack certain skills in critical thinking I would have to disagree. My focus in the debate and yours has been quite different.

You have tried to show that my statements at face value, regardless of the low level arguments I am trying to present, are incorrect. You are trying to take the discussion to a level in which a full scientific discussion would ensue, but are doing so without showing any relevant data to disprove the intent of my statements.

As I said before, there are different levels of debate with different levels of intellect and knowledge. I am debating to the low end of the spectrum as I don’t have specific sources to site at this time to support my arguments and there is no point speaking outside of the general intellect of those that might participate in the discussion.

The scientific definition of theory is nothing more than what I have already stated. You used a more scientifically sound way of saying the same thing I have been saying all along. You are also attempting to twist the low level comments I have made by analyzing them at a high level and making high level assertions about the low level speech.

You said, “In science, it only becomes a “theory” when it rests on a mountain of facts and all attempts to make new predictions based on the theory are accurate, and all attempts to falsify the theory are failures.” I would say that to this date I have not seen any accurate predictions from the theory of global warming. I have not heard any predictions as to what level of warming we will see in increments. I have not heard of accurate predictions of the changing weather patterns that are attributed to the climate shifts.

The list of ‘predictions’ that have not been accurate can go on and on. Perhaps you have links to these predictions that have been accurate and I have missed relevant data on the subject. You continuing to try and discredit me through intelligently calling me stupid doesn’t change the absence of that supporting data though.

Essentially, you are attempting to put words in my mouth. As a side note, even if what you proclaim is true in relation to my level of knowledge, ignorance to the scientific definition of theory has very little to do with the level of knowledge I have in relation to critical thinking. Comparing the two is like comparing horses and apples.

If there is relevant data that you can present for me to review, and upon my review of the data I exhibited no critical thinking, then you might have a leg to stand on. As of now, you have your opinion and I have mine, and a difference in opinion doesn’t automatically equal a lack of critical thinking skills.

Criminals with guns kill people, too. That’s the point of all this. People own guns because they like them, they feel safer with one, or maybe target or sport shooting, or maybe they collect antique guns. Also, I’m a woman and I don’t own a gun, have never held or shot one. However, I know that just because someone owns a gun doesn’t mean they are nuts. One person being irresponsible with a gun doesn’t mean all gun owners are like that.

Here in this country we don’t arrest people without probable cause, we hold trials where people are presumed innocent until they are convicted by a jury. People are free to do what is within the law until they commit an act. We don’t punish or penalize people based on ‘what ifs’ or ‘could happen’ or prohibit people based on what others have done. What greatly concerns me is when people believe they have the authority to decide for others what can and can’t be owned based on the actions of a few. Also when they stigmatize an object, deem it to be bad or evil, because a person chose to use it that way. The outcry from gun owners is because they understand what so many fail to – the person is responsible, not what he used. You think people are safer when there are gun bans? They’re not.

Terrorists and conspiracy theories???? No idea why you mention them. Gun owners don’t have guns because of terrorists or conspiracy theories. People own and carry guns because of criminals or just because they want to. Your reasoning isn’t making much sense.

I agree, government should take unsafe drivers off the road. Government doesn’t take away a driver’s license until you have committed a driving offense. Guns should be kept out of the hands of criminals and the mentally disturbed or not competent people. For government to be able to do this the person has to have a record, they have to already have broken the law. There needs to be evidence that someone isn’t mentally competent, you can’t tell just by looking at them (well some you might be able to,lol). Semi-automatics are rifles and ordinary handguns. They are used for sport/target shooting, hunting, and for self defense. When a crime is committed, the person is held responsible, not what was used. Violence will not be reduced until the cause is addressed. Banning guns, besides being wrong and ineffective, gives people a false sense of security. People think banning the gun fixed it so nothing is done about why people hurt others.

Hi Tux, the U.S. has the highest gun ownership in the world – 89 guns/100 people. We aren’t the worst country in terms of gun murders. The U.S. has a gun murder rate of 3/100,000 that is very far down the list. We are 5th in terms of the number of gun homicides 9,146. We should definitely be working to reduce that number. Gun bans are not how to do it. Getting rid of guns only causes a criminal to choose another weapon. Addressing the reasons people hurt each other and fixing those is what will help.

Would you agree that Great Britain is a good example to use to compare to the U.S.? I know a lot of people use them as an example. Some people believe that getting rid of guns will get rid of violence. It does greatly reduce gun violence (doesn’t get rid of it because criminals will still have guns) but not total violence.

Here are some interesting statistics. This story is from 2009 so I’m sure the numbers have changed some. This shows what is going on in Britain. Their violent crime rate is astronomical, a gun ban did nothing to stop violence.

In the UK, there are 2,034 offences per 100,000 people, way ahead of second-placed Austria with a rate of 1,677. The U.S. has a violence rate of 466 crimes per 100,000 residents, Canada 935, Australia 92 and South Africa 1,609. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: ‘This is a damning indictment of this government’s comprehensive failure over more than a decade to tackle the deep rooted social problems in our society, and the knock on effect on crime and anti-social behaviour.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html#ixzz2IfB5j61A

The idea I’m trying to get across is that it’s not the tool we need to regulate, we need to help people.

Hi nicho, I don’t know of any place where you can walk in and buy a bomb. However, materials used to make something explode are available for anyone to buy. Also, gas tanks, propane tanks, propane heaters can explode. They have instructions for people to follow so the chance of exploding is reduced, but they aren’t banned – they are useful tools. If someone does use them to commit a crime, the person is held responsible not the tool. The point I’m making is that many items are dangerous in the wrong hands. When people use these tools to commit crimes the person is held responsible, not the tool used. Wanting to ban specific firearms and limiting magazine quantities blames the tool and not the people who misuse them. It also punishes people who haven’t broken the law in any way. Bans also don’t address the reason people do this. That is what needs to be done.

The statistics in the story are from the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC). The online article sites the source of their information as being from the UNODC and Small Arms Survey of 2010. Here is the link to the UNDOC page titled UNDOC Homicide Statistics http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html On this page is a link to homicides by firearm. I would include the link to that but it is a microsoft excel worksheet.

A look at how the U.S. ranks in comparison to the rest of world when it comes guns and gun violence.

The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world.

GUN OWNERSHIP PER 100 PEOPLE

1. United States – 89

2. Yemen – 55

3. Switzerland – 46

4. Finland – 45

5. Serbia – 38

——————————————–

Despite the high number of guns, because of its large population, the U.S. does not have the worst firearms murder rate.

GUN MURDERS PER 100,000 PEOPLE

1. Honduras – 69

2. El Salvador – 40

3. Jamaica – 39

4 Venezuela – 39

5. Guatemala – 35

The United States ranks 28th, with a rate of 3 per 100,000 people

—————————————–

*The U.S. is one of the leading countries in the number of deaths attributed to guns.

Actually, yes. All you have to know is what the various types of weapons are intended for and what they can do (disclaimer: I am a former owner of revolvers, pistols, rifles, and a shotgun, so I’m not totally an amateur).

You don’t have to know a carbeuretor from a fuel injector or whether your SUV’s locking differential uses a viscous coupling unit or a multi-plate clutch to account for slippage on turns in order to know what types of cars are intended for what usage and understand the difference between safe driving and dangerous driving.

I wonder just how educated YOU are on the subject of guns. You can, no doubt, grasp the concept of a decocker and the differences among various types of cartridges, but just how deep does your knowledge go?

When I was shooting, I got interested in the physics of ballistics. For example, to calculate the Kinetic Energy (KE) of a bullet when it leaves the muzzle, the simple formula is

(KE) – 1/2 MV² (I’m not sure the superscript 2 will show on all fonts, but it is the “squared” sign).

where KE is kinetic energy, M is mass in pounds, and V² is the square of the velocity in fps.

So, given that drag is difficult to measure, to calculate the Kinetic Energy when the bullet hits its target, what do they use instead? It’s a simple formula to derive it – do you know it?

It wasn’t ad hominem abusive, because I wasn’t attacking you, just your lack of knowledge about a subject of which you apparently know nothing. The acknowledgement that global warming is real is NOT a proactive judgement based on anecdotal evidence (although the global-warming denial movement tends to be). As for theory vs fact I just posted a lengthy explanation about the Fallacy of Equivocation in which you use a non-scientific definition of “theory” which is VERY different from the meaning of the word in scientific discussions. In science, a “hypothesis” (what you think of as a theory) doesn’t get accepted as a “theory” until a mountain of facts support it and none falsifies it. So, enough facts = theory in science.

As for talking about your liberal use of logical fallacies and your complete ignorance of real science and the scientific method, you show it by not even distinguishing between “theory as opinion” and “theory as a scientitic explanation that accounts for ALL of the known facts (and there have to be a truly significant number of facts before scientists accept it as a valid theory). That is the Logical Fallacy of Equivocation.

It ain’t ad hominem if it is true…sigh, what has become of education in the last 40 years? I started to learn critical thinking and logical fallacies in high school English and Debating classes and continued to study critical thinking and the Scientific Method all through High School, College, and Graduate School.

You are making an argument that is nothing more than an uninformed opinion when you falsely accuse the community of Climatologists are doing the same. If you read a couple dozen books BY Climatologists and followed the papers in the journals, methinks you would not be so cocksure.

“Every man takes the limits of his own vision as the limits of the world.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer

I would kindly suggest that you make an honest attempt to stretch the limits of your vision before judging the rest of the world. Study, study, study…

There are two diametrically opposed definitions for the word “theory.” In the non-scientific world, theory is usually used to express an opinion, as in “Since every time I’ve passed a burning building, I’ve seen all these red trucks pouring some sort of liquid into the building. It is my theory that these red trucks go around burning buildings down.” Incidentally, that is a classic logical fallacy assuming the wrong causation from the correlation. It is usually referred to as “Confusing Cause And Effect.”

In science, the word “hypothesis” is used to refer to an unproven guess based on some observations and data. Once the data and experimentation (the “facts”) are in overwhelming agreement, then the hypothesis is acknowledged to be a “theory.” As in “the theory of special relativity,” “the theory of electro-magnetic force,” “the theory of quantum mechanics,” “the theory of evolution,” or “THE THEORY OF GOLBAL WARMING.” In science, it only becomes a “theory” when it rests on a mountain of facts and all attempts to make new predictions based on the theory are accurate, and all attempts to falsify the theory are failures.

You are falling prey to a common logical fallacy called “Equivocation,” where a word can have more than one meaning and you are using the inappropriate meaning. It is one of several “Fallacies of Ambiguity.” People ignorant of the Scientific Method use this fallacy over and over to try to discredit or belittle conclusions (theories) based on massive bases of facts.

An amusing example of the Equivocation Fallacy:

“But, Your Honor, I don’t deserve this parking ticket. The sign said “Fine for Parking,” so I thought it was a good place to park.”

Your ignorance of the scientific definition of “theory” reveals an all-encompassing lack of knowledge of even the basics of critical thinking, particularly as it pertains to applying the “Scientific Method.”

JCPenney or mall security should have asked this guy to leave. He is afforded the right to carry a firearm anywhere in Utah, apparently, which is fine with me. Same here in VT (openly or concealed, no regulation). But there is no need to have a 2 guns that combined probably carried 42 rounds of ammo to buy some underwear in a JCPenney store (ok i have no idea what he was doing there other than making a statement, but who really knows)Stores and malls aren’t public property and reserve the right not to allow guns

I wouldn’t take the fact that he was allowed to stay in the store for so long as an implication of tacit allowance and acceptance of his rights to express himself and carry in accordance with Utah law… But it’s rather more likely that no one wanted to approach the big dude with two guns strapped to himself and ask him what he was doing with two guns in a department store…

samizdat asserted that AdonisArmor was delusional. The assertion was based purely on the existence of a difference of opinion and not based on any sort of clinically relevant standards in relation to delusional thinking. Thus, the difference to learn, as already stated, is between delusional thinking and difference of opinion.

I rarely see a person that is debating from the ‘right’ claim that a person from the ‘left’ is delusional simply because of a difference of opinion. I do frequently see the opposite though. In this case, it is clear that instead of making a relevant argument, samizdat just pulled from the one-liner playbook. Either samizdat is intentionally obtuse or doesn’t know that a difference in opinion does not equal delusional thinking.

Do you honestly think AdonisArmor’s comment was delusional? I would be willing to bet you don’t see it as delusional. I would be willing to bet that no medical professional would say it was delusional. Therefore your response pointing out that there can be a difference of opinion concerning a delusion was intentionally argumentative and irrelevant to the current discussion.

Sadly, you already know that nobody is going to actually demonstrate anything. They will just say you are wrong over and over without any sort of relevant talking points. It seems that is the case when debating with the ‘left’ in my experience. I make 20 points and they blanket deny all points without any sort of logic or supporting evidence.

I a pretty sure ‘facts cannot be refuted’ was the exact stance I took on the matter. The so-called ‘facts’ of global warming can and have been refuted. Let’s be clear here. I do not refute most of the data as being factual, I refute the conclusions of that data as being a known.

The conclusions of the data are continuously changing. The timeline of global warming is constantly changing. The ‘too much damage has been done there is no going back’ line in relation to the damages caused by contributing factors keeps changing.

I am not refuting there are consequences, just that the relevant data and the interpretation of that data is theory and not fact. I really don’t know how to be more clear than that.

Please. The ‘fire in a theater’ is what all sane people use as an example of we are not completely free and have responsibilities to others.

You are trying too hard. Many people don’t need to have hee-rows walking around ready to save us at the drop of a cowboy hat, and don’t want to have anything to do with people who need to be armed. Its comical, really, when it isn’t sad.

The old, tired “fire in a theater”. Was wondering when this would make it’s appearance. Well, allow me my usual retort. Yelling “fire” in a theater implies deception, in that, I know that there is no fire. When I wear my gun openly, I am not intending to decieve you nor am I intending to panic you. In fact, I want as little to do with you as possible. Not to mention that it is fully appropriate to yell fire in a theater that is, in fact, on fire.

The rational argument being…what? Your tired tropes that have been disproven time and time again? Or perhaps your outright lies and bloated statistics that have been disproven time and time again?

“We determined, we were right”…what are you? Borg? Ah, yes, it seems you’re managed to surmise very little on your own your entire life. Borg seems appropriate.

Before you even start, let’s get your weak ad hominem assumptions out of the way. I don’t belong to the NRA. I’m anti-war. I’m pro gay rights. I’m nice in person. I’m not overweight, nor a redneck. I don’t watch Fox News.

Well I try to afford other people’s incomplete logic some sort of thought on my end. As we all know, writing can be a very difficult medium to debate with. Not to mention that these are intended to be short responses (as short as they can be made) which leaves some things lost in translation.

There are many causes I take up and debate about. A lot of the time I intentionally leave thoughts incomplete to test the individual I am debating. For instance, not a single person has actually refuted my ‘assault rifles account for less than 5% of shootings statistic’ that I have used in multiple different responses here on this page. Perhaps I was close enough with my estimate, but that statistic is an educated guess on my part based on the number crunching in my head. Yet I am the one to state the statistic is not wholly accurate without anyone actually confronting me.

This shows that people are not willing to do research on the matter of their own. And to those that have not done any research or fact checking, I submit to you it is time you do and that you hold off on full support to either side until a time in which you educate yourself. Both sides may stretch the truth, but only 1 side of this specific debate actually benefits from inflating the statistics.

Here is an example of an inflated statistic that is being used by politicians of the Democrat persuasion: 181 major school shootings have happened since the Columbine shooting. Let’s break that down:

The statistic comes from the Brady Campaign. Of the 181 major shootings on that list, 16 of them did not happen on or around school grounds. 12 of ‘shootings’ in fact were not even shootings at all. 60 of the ‘major shootings’ involved 1 person being shot.

The real number of ‘major school shootings’ since Columbine, based on the definition of major school shooting being more than 1 person being shot and injured or killed (2+ victims), is 62. The real number is 62, but the politicians and anti-gun agenda crew reports 181.

There is a significant difference between the truth and the number being used. Regardless of the opinion on whether 62 is still too many shootings, don’t you think that you deserve better than a statistic that gives you triple the truth? If you would like generic numbers, Columbine happened in 1999. 13 years, 62 major shootings, 100k schools in the nation. The real numbers are quite less alarming than the ones used in the media.

So in the end, it would seem strange that a person that seems at least relatively sane, regardless of whether you agree with my opinion on the matter, would fight so hard to keep such small changes from being made to the 2nd Amendment.

The reason I am willing to fight is because the decision appears to be based on misrepresentation of the facts and the unwillingness to even attempt to gain the smallest amount of education on the matter. I am all for educated decision making, regardless of whether a person sides with me, but not for fear induced decision making based on misrepresentation of the facts.

Yet nobody has shown me that I am wrong in stating theory is not necessarily fact. How dare I ask that people not misrepresent theory as fact. I should be flogged for being so insane as to request people make their case with accurate portrayals of the data they wish to use.

So let me understand your stance. While theory is indeed considered to be less than fact, I am ignorant for stating that I disagree with the portrayal of theory as fact. Apparently the truth makes me ignorant and your denial of the truth makes you not?

Ok, you tell me if I’m being too critical. Watch the video and take note at the :50 mark and the 1:42 mark; what is most pronounced is not the “big muscles” that 2patricius2 notices, but the large pot belly that hangs over his belt.

History Note: The Celtic culture of ancient Gaul—both among warriors and civilians—was marked by exuberant homoeroticism, as was noted by many Roman writers and historians of ancient times. Did you know that in ancient Gaul, if a young man’s belly hung over his belt, he was punished? (He was probably punished until he got with the program and worked off the pot belly.)

I know I’ve asked this before. What would you do without me to add some sunshine to your day?

You have a good mind, even if the logic is incomplete at times. I would rather see you make arguments for the erosion of Constitutional rights under The Patriot Act and the Unitary Presidency, that are far more alarming than minor adjustments to gun ownership laws. As a sophisticated gun owner you know that Obama’s showtime is mostly propaganda and will ultimately be ineffectual. After all is said and done here, in this comment play.,It is the above that are the most serious threat to citizen freedom and the aspect of tyranny.

Hi Colleen, no. I just missed this one. I started at the top of the thread to answer the comments. I also added an apology to my initial comment, I left the initial comment there as a reminder to myself that ever though I try to be civil and polite, I don’t always succeed. Since you asked about the source I’ll put my answer here. If you read my apology, you’ll see that I am as concerned as anyone else about the violence in our country. When Sandy Hook happened, I was right there with (figuratively) everyone else saying we HAVE to do something so this doesn’t happen again. Ok, my sources, I am only interested in unbiased, not slanted, or spun facts. I am looking for cold, hard, verifiable facts, data, statistics, and conclusions. I want whoever reads this to be able to verify and trust the numbers. I’ll continue on a comment up above right under my first one.

No that is not the case. For example: Simply disagreeing with the rational and logical statements of Augustine or Aquinas in ‘proving’ the existence of God does not make the existence of God any less delusional.

“You really should actually learn about the skill of critical thinking” Exactly so. Amateur logicians, so common among Libertarians, assume they have proven their case by affirming a thesis created by circular semantics. A brilliant, original example is Augustine proving the rational existence of the non-extant ‘God.’

That isn’t correct Colleen. Here is a comparison of the united states and other countries. We have the most guns per person, but we are do not have the most firearm murders per capita. We are number one in gun ownership, but we are 28th in gun murders. This is important information people need to know. It’s not morons with poor impulse control and anger management problems.

A look at how the U.S. ranks in comparison to the rest of world when it comes guns and gun violence.

The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world.

GUN OWNERSHIP PER 100 PEOPLE

1. United States – 89

2. Yemen – 55

3. Switzerland – 46

4. Finland – 45

5. Serbia – 38

——————————————–

Despite the high number of guns, because of its large population, the U.S. does not have the worst firearms murder rate.

GUN MURDERS PER 100,000 PEOPLE

1. Honduras – 69

2. El Salvador – 40

3. Jamaica – 39

4 Venezuela – 39

5. Guatemala – 35

The United States ranks 28th, with a rate of 3 per 100,000 people

—————————————–

*The U.S. is one of the leading countries in the number of deaths attributed to guns.

Original and intelligent. Is that truly the argument you want to make against this sort of action? I don’t think his penis size has anything to do with this, but perhaps you can point me towards the statistic you are using to base your “the bigger the gun the smaller the penis” attitude is supported by.

In this scenario, the concern is this woman having a gun. ANY gun. While the argument that is most vocalized from the gun owners is against any form of gun control that simply is not the opinion of most.

I do not support an assault rifle ban. I do not support a ban on 30-round magazines. The reason is simple. There is no evidence at all that either of those things are a problem. They certainly are not responsible for even a significant amount of the gun violence. Most states actually have equal or more murders with shotguns than assault rifles.

Gun owners, or at least the ones I know, do support or are at least are willing to discuss applying handgun background requirements on assault rifles though.

The argument from the anti-gun crew is a simple question of why I would need an assault rifle. Great question, but hardly justification for banning the style of weapon. Many may disagree, but I still to this day have not heard a single response as to how an assault rifle ban would make people safer.

See, the problem is that Republican men don’t PROTECT anyone. Not with their ideas, their policies and certainly not with their guns. It astonishes that guys with a politics as vicious and dehumanizing as the present day American conservative believe that ANYONE will buy that ‘good guy’ crap. We understand what y’all are.

Your assertion of steroid use is quite ridiculous. There are hundreds of factors that could make him carrying a weapon more dangerous than if those factors didn’t exist, but to claim that those factors exist based on no knowledge is just as ‘nutty’ and ‘paranoid’ as the very people the anti-gun crew claim all gun owners are.

Gun accidents happen around guns. No question of it. Just like car accidents happen around cars and house fires happen around houses. Are they equivalent? Not really, but the point overall stands firm. Accidents happen.

Were you at any of those gun shows? Would you ever attend a gun show? If the answer is no, then once again I state that you have unjust paranoia in relation to guns.

Carrying assault rifles slung over the back into department stores is not simply an exercise of a right granted by the law. It is also an in-your-face statement. I also noticed that this man has big muscles and a head that is small in comparison. That may be an indication of the use of steroids. Steroids can lead to rages. Guns and steroids are not a good combination. Let’s hope this man is not on steroids if he continues to carry his weapons around with him.

By the way, when I see police with guns in public spaces, or even in restaurants or public buildings, I do not think twice. I assume they have been well trained in the use of weapons, though police sometimes use their weapons badly. But I do not know what the training or mindset of people like this man are. Police don’t brandish their weapons in such an obvious way. They wear them in holsters.

I am not sure what it is you are looking for from me. The events that lead to the inclusion of the 2nd Amendment have no bearing on the discussion at hand, which was refuting your assertions about gun owners. Perhaps you would like to actually get to the point you are trying to make and then we can debate the validity of your point.

If your point is simply that you have more knowledge on the 2nd Amendment than most, then ok. You win that one buddy. You know more than most, to include gun owners. How that ties into the discussion at hand eludes me, but perhaps now you are willing to forego the beating around the bush for some actual talking points.

So you have never heard of children left in cars that are running putting those vehicles into drive or reverse on accident causing injuries or damage to property? Guess we live in different worlds karmanot.

So you are refuting that accidents happen or what? I was simply contesting the statement that this had anything to do with any sort of fanatic and pointing out that accidents of all types happen and does not result in calling the people involved fanatics.

Was this preventable? Yes. Was this irresponsible of the gun owner? Yes. Is that gun owner a fanatic because of the answer to the previous 2 questions? Nope.

Nice post until your ad hominem attacks on me. There are levels of debating that are different dependent upon the individuals involved.

I don’t actually have the time to get into this much larger debate with you, but I will point out is that you use the term theory quite often in your rebuttal. All I have said is that theory is not absolute fact.

I disagree with the full concept of global warming, based on the evidence provided. I have stated that while I disagree with the full concept there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the theory could be correct. That doesn’t change the difference between theory and fact.

I don’t fight proactive decisions based on the anecdotal evidence of global warming. I just keep an open mind. I use critical thinking and information from both sides of the argument, in all matters not just global warming, to make a determination of my stance. You may disagree, but you have made no actual assertion that holds weight when attempting to discredit that statement.

Yes karmanot. People having a logical debate on a subject amounts to the person you disagree with being a troll. That is absolutely ridiculous. You are the troll sir, contributing nothing and attempting to illicit angry responses from me. Not going to happen, but figured I would clear that up for you.

The safety issue can’t be addressed by someone that doesn’t have all the information. You clearly have the intent to be nothing more than argumentative regardless of the content of my statements. The only difference is that I won’t start insulting you because I disagree with your ridiculous statements.

A person owning an assault rifle and stockpiling military grade arms and ammunition are two very different issues. If you don’t see that then there is nothing more for us to say to each other on this matter.

Look at all the ridiculous statements that have been made in my direction on this very board. If you actually compare the amount of radical behavior from both sides I think you will see that it is your side that seems to hold the most radicals. 311 million people in the United States, 60% of which are gun owners, and you want to base your argument on the statements of less than an handful of people you actually have a case for saying are nuts. That makes perfect sense.

I know. Next we should attack your freedom of speech. I mean what is more dangerous here? Is it more dangerous to have 1 person that is off their rocker and making stupid statements or more dangerous for 1 person that is gifted in the art of what is best known as ‘brainwashing’ gaining the support of large amounts of people willing to do violence in their name?

Based on that given scenario the speech of that one man is very dangerous to people and has the potential for harm, so we should stomp out that right based on your theories of stomping out assault rifles. Just making a comparison using another right that you have as an example. I am pretty sure you don’t want your free speech to be limited based on what an extremely small amount of people may or may not use speech to influence, but that is what you are demanding of guns.

Who says I am paranoid? You do. Clearly I am sure you are qualified to make that assertion based on your vast education in clinical psychology right?

Did I make the 2nd Amendment? Were the ‘gun nuts’ of today the reason behind the intent of the 2nd Amendment? Nope.

As to your question about what my weapon could do agains the military might of the United States government, my gun would probably do more than yours. I have the same training and experience as our military. Do I foresee a need to use my skills to defend our citizens against our tyrannical government. Nope. Read my previous post.

I would say that if anyone is paranoid, based on the assertion that paranoia is nothing more than irrational fear, it would be you. You are paranoid that me owning an assault rifle, of which less than 5% of all shootings are attributed, somehow puts you in more danger than me having the guns that will not be banned. That is irrational. That good sir, is paranoia.

I wonder why it is necessary for that man to carry a weapon like that into a shopping mall (with today’s gun hysteria) for the same reason I wonder why there can be 900 shades of one type of lipstick and even good lighting can’t help me tell any difference between two shades that are one number apart. It’s just… why is this necessary? Why have resources been devoted to this?

I have no problem with people owning guns. I sleep with one in my nightstand, but only because I’m occasionally alone in a big house with some antiques. My dad collects Civil War memorabilia, including guns, and has been known to take a WW2 rifle out back for a few shots at the dead tree. My mom target-shoots with a thirty-aught six. That’s fine. That’s their thing. I don’t like shooting simply because I’ve got sensitive ears and a very low tolerance for being startled, but I’m not going to try to take their guns away because they are responsible gun owners. On the other hand, my best friend’s mom wants a gun, because she is fully convinced that OBAMA HIMSELF is going to break into her house and rape her. Now, a person as out of touch with reality as that is the LAST person I want with ready access to a firearm, because God knows what else is out there that she will feel the urgent need to defend herself against.

I speak only for myself, and my primary education and expertise is in Computer and Digital Electronic Science (multiple doctorates in hardware and software science). However, I do know that I would turn to Climatologists for an education on the finer points of climatology, while some of them (and people from a variety of domains) turn to me for education or aid in my particular scientific domains.

“All scientists” are not climatologists. You wouldn’t want a dermatologist or PhD psychologist performing your heart surgery. You would seek out somebody who was trained as a thoracic surgeon, is board-certified, and has practiced a number of years. You would be a fool to think that anybody but a cardiac specialist could offer informed opinion on heart disease.

There is NEVER 100% of any scientific community that agrees – the fact that 99% of a community agrees is rather extraordinary. They may argue about fine points of the myriad interactions in a warming climate and how best to mitigate them, but on the basic idea that the climate is warming, they agree. And, given that large changes are taking place over decades, even single years, while natural climate change happens over thousands or millions of years, there is virtually unanimous agreement that something other than natural causes has tremendously stirred the pot.

There are always some fossilized hold-outs in any field of knowledge who don’t want to accept that their old theories are being proven wrong. There are also a few who have ideological, financial, or political motivations for their contrarian views (former Astronomer Royal Fred Hoyle never gave up his belief in a steady-state universe long after it had been proven wrong).

BTW, nothing in science is ever “an absolute.” To be considered scientific, any proposition, hypothesis, or theory MUST be falsifiable (which means continually testable). That means that, even if you have performed 100,000 experiments that confirm it, there is always the ever-more-remote chance that a new experiment will discredit it.

The theory of gravity is not understood as “an absolute.” And, one day, if an apple falls off a tree and falls up into the stratosphere instead of down on the ground, then scientists are going to have to revisit their theory. However, that possibility doesn’t prevent us from getting on an airplane or lying awake nights terrified that we might fall off the planet and float into space. Nor does it prevent calculating a ballistic trajectory, or calculating a Mars rendezvous of a satellite.

You really should actually learn about the skill of critical thinking (which is not innate and must be learned) and the scientific method of expanding human knowledge before you make the sort of know-nothing statements you continue to try to defend using a catalog of formal and informal logical fallacies.

I have done extensive research on the second amendment, thank you, but I’m interested in hearing your version–because I feel that very few Americans, gun-friendly or not, know the circumstances of its inclusion. In particular, I’m interested in your version of the events in Virginia, and in particular, George Mason, to ensure their inclusion in the Bill of Rights.

There is, in fact, a growing mountain of fact that global warming is happening, has been accelerating for decades, and is largely due to human activity. It is not anecdotal, nor is it an opinion. It is considered by at least 99% of actual climatologists (those not employed by industry or right-wing think tanks) to be as solidly proven as the theories of electro-magnetism, gravity, physics, and evolution (which draws proof from just about every other scientific discipline (like genetics, biology, anthropology, geology, astronomy and cosmology, archeology, paleontology, and dozens of other sciences. Climate change is as well supported by thousands of studies and computer models as evolution. If evolution were denied, you would have to deny ALL science. So, the next time you enter a dark room, do you drop on your knees and pray for light, or do you accept scientific theory and reach for the light switch? The arguments against global warming are promulgated by people who have an additional agenda, whether it is a faux-libertarian belief in protecting industry from government regulation, protecting corporate profit margins from additional costs of cleaning up their processes, or just a general anti-intellectual know-nothing mentality that has been on the rise for decades.

Gun owners have not risen up and criticized the NRA when it tries to get fully-automatic assault weapons legalized. Nor when it fought so hard to prevent cop-killer bullets, designed to penetrate police body armor, from being banned. Nor when it fought to forbid the FBI or ATF from even checking the terrorist lists when doing a background check. Nor when it fought to prevent any reasonable registration system that would not prevent people from legitimately buying weapons, but would at least keep track of them (like they do with automobiles and even library books). Nor when it fights every day to block any scientific studies on ANY aspect of the gun questions. How do you claim not to be ignorant when nobody is allowed even to study the issues and determine the actual facts on the ground.

If you believe the NRA, you might be interested to know that, for over 100 years, the NRA was the country’s leading proponent of gun control! Only after Wayne LaPierre and his band of paranoid conspiracists come to power in a hostile takeover in 1976 did the NRA become the organization it is today. LaPierre’s former number two, Tanya Metaxa, got some bad publicity when, while still on the board of the NRA, she was posting bomb-making instructions on her website for the survivalist militia moonbats.

You might also ponder that their latest ad about Obama’s kids’ school being guarded by 11 armed security guards was a total lie. There are 11 people on the Sitwell School’s roster as various fulltime and parttime security employees, which is where the NRA got their number. However, NONE of them are armed. The only armed guards on the school site are the Secret Service agents – who are REQUIRED BY FEDERAL LAW to protect anybody in the current President’s family. The Wayne LaPierres of this world NEVER tell the truth when a lie will serve their agenda better.

They’re just making it that much easier for the real mentally unsound serial killer. Now he can walk right into his chosen venue, gun in hand, and open fire with no warning. He no longer has to smuggle it in under a long topcoat or such. You don’t know if he’s an open-carry good guy or the person who is about to give your loved ones a nice new funeral until AFTER he pulls the trigger.

At least with concealed carry, you aren’t instantly perceived by most people as a potential threat, as you are with open carry. If you live in a state with a stand-your-ground law, I’d think twice or more about the danger to you if you open carry.

Not much of a thought. You don’t have to recognize the difference between a Glock and a SIG-Sauer, or an AK-47 style assault rifle and an AR-17 style assault rifle to understand the important part – that this is a highly lethal weapon that can turn you into hamburger in seconds should the carrier so choose.

Isn’t it funny that the very same people who so revere the Constitution (or at least a subordinate clause of a single sentence in the Second Amendment) that they see ANY regulation on their guns to be a violation of their rights and are prepared to fight for that right (and seem ready to kill somebody who disagrees with them) almost always also turn out to be the people who so loathe and despise the clear Constitutional right for a woman to elect an abortion, and use virtually any coercive legal, illegal, and political shenanigan to make it difficult, if not impossible, for a woman to exercise her equally protected Constitutional right to an abortion. Again, they are so passionate that they are also willing to fight (and sometimes kill) anybody who disagrees with their objection to THAT Constitutional right. Seems that you are only safe from these wackaloons while you are a fetus. Once you are born, you’re fair game.

I wonder if the “open gun carrying Soccer Mom” in central PA, who made the news several years ago after wearing her semi-automatic pistol on her belt to her son’s soccer game felt safe. If she did, she was deluded as the current news has a story about Meleanie Hain being shot to death in her home by her husband (a fellow open carry enthusiast) while she was actually on a web video chat with a friend (who witnessed the whole thing). Her husband then fired a couple more shots into her corpse, traipsed upstairs and blew his head off with a 12-gauge. Fat lot of good HER gun did her.

And all that has to happen is for you to meet another person with the same point of view (and a gun in his pocket) who gives in to his own fear of your gun, acts irresponsibly, and “protects himself” by blowing you into hamburger.

The big fallacy about the protection that a gun offers is that the “bad guy” as the NRA oversimplifies it, knows before you that he is going to point a gun at you, and no matter how fast you can draw, he’s already got you in his sights (given that he doesn’t come up behind you.

The go-to guy for pro-gun NRA opinions by the local press when I lived in the Philly suburbs decades ago was a gun-shop owner who would proudly show his highly modified .45 ACP Colt Combat Commander in an open-carry tactical holster. He bragged that he never went anywhere without it. So, one day, he was restocking ammo on the shelves behind the counter, his back to the door, when he heard the door warning bell go off. By the time he stood up and turned around, he was staring at two ski-masked robbers, one with a pistol and the other with a shotgun – both pointed at his center of mass. They piled all of his store’s handguns into sacks they had brought, cleaned out the register, and, for good measure, relieved him of his Colt. For an open carry or concealed carry to be effective protection, you will usually have to be a mindreader, since usually the perp draws first.

I agree that the Second Amendment is needed and that it certainly applies to individual citizens protecting their homes or businesses. What I don’t think the Second Amendment does is give individual citizens the right to amass arsenals of military-style weapons that are used in warfare. I think that’s what is being debated right now in Congress, and I see nothing wrong or sinister in those proposals. We agree on the need for the Second Amendment, but I hope we can also agree on the lack of need for building private military arsenals. After all, what could the intention be in stockpiling military arsenals like that? And where would we draw the line? Dirty bombs? Nuclear material (which is very portable)?

Tell the three people that got hit with bird shot at that gun show that the shotgun shell must have just crawled into the chamber by itself. No, it didn’t. The owner of the shotgun was horribly negligent and this was a preventable event. It happened because the gun owner was an irresponsible idiot. But hey, hammers and kitchen knives and cars, blah blah blah. Wolverines!!!

Perhaps Conservatives are too ashamed to talk about their penises (a sore subject to them) – hence the big guns and Hummer fetishes. Anyway, it is a substitute for insecure manhood, not actually short penises that attracts many to guns (read the Bushmaster website, where they assure customers that buying a semi-automatic assault rifle will get you your “man card.”

I hope that, as an open-carry person, you don’t get shot to death by a stand-your-ground person who misinterprets your intentions and believes himself to be threatened by a civilian armed with a similar weapon. You’d be dead and he’d get off on a legal and justifiable killing. You don’t have to threaten anybody – you just have to be PERCEIVED as a threat by a stand-your-grounder who is then free to blow the top of your head off. In America, the murder capital of the modern western countries, many people would take open showing of a gun as a legitimate threat.

There is a big difference between people who own and use weapons as tools and those who make a cult out of worshiping them and believing they are arming themselves because of a shared conspiracy delusion. For them, a gun is to fight a “new revolution” against their own government. I am as anti-gun-nut as anybody, yet I have owned pistols, rifles, and a shotgun as needed. I lived for years deep in the Rocky Mountains in a small cottage at almost 10,000 feet altitude, and kept a .243 “varmint” rifle, had a Colt Python .357 magnum (bought after an all-too-close encounter with a full-grown grizzly bear while hiking over the pass at Blanca Peak). The shotgun was for home protection since I had only short-wave radio and CB for communications and no neighbors within a half-mile. Once I no longer had need for weapons, I sold them and have never fired a weapon since (I now live in a major city’s exurbs in the northeast).

Seriously? If the government was going to treat it’s citizens in the manner that prompted the revolution…what the fuck is your popgun going to do against the military might of the United States government? It’s ridiculous any way you want to look at it…the level of fucking paranoia is unbelievable among you gun nuts.

But but we’re scared????? You’re the fucking pussy that needs his gun. It’s the paranoid douchebags like yourself and that JC Penney block head that need their weapons taken away for mental illness. You are one sick fuck

By the way, ARP, these semi-automatic AR-17-type rifles ARE assault weapons, not just assault-type. It is a well propagated myth that “real” military assault weapons are fully automatic instead of semi-automatic. Not true. The M-14 started out automatic, but with its large cartridge, was too hard to control, so they were all semi-automatic. The M-16 comes in several models. There is one with an automatic option on the selector switch, and a much more common one that does NOT include an automatic mode. It can only fire single shots or can be set to fire three-round bursts for so-called “triple taps.” Besides, I’ve talked to a number of COMBAT vets ranging from Vietnam vets through Iraq/Afghanistan vets, and they all tell me that they use single-shot exclusively or virtually exclusively to preserve ammo. The newbie soldiers and National Guardsmen we are currently using to fight our wars are so inexperienced that the average shot-to-kill ratio is 15,000 rounds fired for each single enemy death – and these guys at least went through some sort of combat marksmanship training. Given that the average gun owner and carrier in this country does not have to have even minimal training, the idea that a bunch of loons walking tall with lethal weapons makes them, let alone the rest of us, safer, is insanity.

A real shooting situation – especially when the other person might be shooting back – has no relation to target shooting at the firing range. Describing his FBI basic training, former Special Agent and later HRT sniper Christopher Whitcomb describes the difference between playing at shooting and a real situation:

“Adrenaline pumps through your veins, increasing your heart rate and making your front sight hard to track. Your shoulder muscles pinch down on your carotid artery, occluding blood flow to your brain. Your eyes try to focus on the other guy’s gun at the expense of your own sights. Your mind flips through the most illogical thoughts, trying to make sense of a situation few people ever dream of confronting. Fine motor skills fade. Vision narrows. Sound disappears. Eight out of every ten rounds fired in law enforcement gunfights never hit anyone anyway, so the highest probability for success comes with aiming at the largest part of the offending person and pulling the trigger until he goes down or you run out of rounds. You take your chances with all that other stuff later. Maybe that’s the point of the trigger pull test. So much for accuracy. Now, try making a life-or-death decision in the time it takes to finish this sentence. Whoops. Too late, you’re dead.”

Had to like that one. Wouldn’t be nice if it were just a big school yard argument, and you guys didn’t think that gun people like me caused deaths with our thoughts and I didn’t think that anti’s like you guys caused deaths with your laws? Much love to everyone, regardless of your positions. Good night.

Yeah. Nobody is trying to overthrow the government. Nobody, aside from some actual nuts, is saying that we have a need to fight our tyrannical government. Nobody is comparing our situation to that of the colonists prior to the revolution.

The idea of the 2nd Amendment is partially as a deterrent to the government ever treating its citizens in the manner that prompted the revolution. There of course is more to the 2nd Amendment’s purpose, but your statement doesn’t seem to relay the understanding that just because the ability the 2nd Amendment affords the people is not needed at this time that it is possible for the ability to be needed in the future.

Likely needed? No. Guaranteed to be needed? As long as we maintain our 2nd Amendment Rights I would say it is pretty much guaranteed that we won’t need to flex the ability it affords. Whether we like it or not, it is a catch 22.

The heads at Fox News only support military-style assault weapons for people who are unhappy with the results of the last election. I guess that wouldn’t apply to the New Black Panthers carrying military-style assault weapons.

Yes, there are. Plenty. Safety, security, free will, rights, freedom. These words have no meaning to you? Spout the same four or five arguments until you’re blue in the face. It won’t make any of them logical.

Name calling..? Ok then, back to the sandbox, simpleton. Try to have a rational argument next time.

LOL. Maybe Michael Pearson is not a fundie Christian, but you’ve summarized the worldview of the fundie Xtians perfectly. Jesus riding on a dinosaur. When it comes to wingnut comedy, it doesn’t get better than that.

For that matter, we register all cars, post an identifying license plate on them, require their owners to carry considerable liability insurance, test the potential drivers for driving skill and knowledge of safety laws to get a license, often revoke licenses for driving drunk and other offenses, and monitor car use via traffic police.

You are allowed to carry a concealed semi-automatic pistol with a 19-round clip of cop-killer ammo around drunk as a skunk in states with open carry and concealed carry permits – just don’t get caught trying to drive home from the bar or firing range.

My apologies if I my guess about you was wrong, but I clearly stated that it was just a guess. And why did I make such a guess, you might wonder? Because there are so many fundie Christians out there who want to discredit science altogether. I can see by your reply that you’re not in the crowd who want to wage a “war on science.” At least you’re taking the work of reputable scientists into account before forming an opinion. But you know, there really are way too many fundamentalist Xtians out there who are out to discredit science in order to push their religious agenda. I’m glad you’re not one of them.

There seems to be a small minority of gun owners who don’t simply want to protect their home or business from a potential intruder, but they want to match the government in firepower. This minority yammers on about their intention to protect themselves from a tyrannical government.

My I ask where in the hell they get off comparing themselves to the American colonists who were all disenfranchised? The American colonists didn’t have the right to vote in the very British parliament that imposed taxes on them, hence the phrase “No taxation without representation.” The gun-lobby advocates on this thread are not disenfranchised. They vote in every election. They lost. When they call a government tyrannical just because they lost the last election, that’s simple lying. When they advocate overthrowing the government that a majority of their fellow citizens elected, that’s treason. I would ask this minority of gun-lobby advocates to stop comparing themselves to disenfranchised 18th-century American colonists. Their fellow citizens outvoted them and won fair and square. They needn’t even dream that they’re going to use all of their popguns to override the results of the last election. They have the right to vote, unlike the American colonists. They just lost.

The ‘gun wackaloons’ that would be carrying quite possibly wouldn’t take a man open carrying as a direct threat. You never know, but what is deemed a reasonable ‘belief’ of danger is quite a grey area. Look at the Zimmerman case. Even after a prolonged scuffle the shooting wasn’t straight forward under the law. There is a lot to that discussion, but regardless of how the event transpired (a discussion for another time), Zimmerman had every reason to use the gun before it could be used against him

I have been wondering if, in states with the “Stand Your Ground” law, a counterperson or other customer might not take the appearance of a guy with an assault weapon as a clear implied threat to their safety and shoot the *sshole dead before he could even raise his weapon. Given that other fast food shops and ordinary restaurants have been shot up by spree killers (I remember a notorious one in Texas), killing this guy would be entirely legal. “Stand your ground” laws only require that the person who shoots somebody else “believes” him or herself to be in danger. No overt act has to happen. Lets see how the inherent conflict between “open carry” and “stand your ground” causes the gun wackaloons to eliminate each other for the safety of the rest of us non-moonbats.

Wow. The level of assumptions the individuals that disagree with me make are outstanding. I am not religious in the least. Also, if you notice you used the term ‘public opinion’. Fact is fact. You may have an interpretation of fact, but fact is irrefutable which means there is very little ‘swaying’ in relation to it.

An overwhelming consensus of scientists isn’t all scientists. What gives some scientists, and I speak of actual reputable scientists, the capacity to disagree? Evidence, or lack thereof, is the reason why I agree with the scientists that are not fully prepared to definitively state global warming is an absolute.

I have fears. Rational, healthy fears just like other people. He or she who claims to fear nothing is lying to you. However, my attitude is irrelevant, it is factual that my gun makes me “feel safer” because my gun makes me safer. It also makes me nicer, and more respectful, as well as more interested in de-escalation of conflict.

Your reading comprehension is amazing to me. I don’t even have to type words and somehow you read them. Did I say that charges would be filed for that sort of report? No. I said that the statement the individual made would be a false report. There is a huge difference there.

See, the person couldn’t know that the guy there was dangerous and I didn’t see it anywhere in the report where it says he was acting erratically. So to say a dangerous man with assault rifles is acting erratically would not be true.

Hell, I even said what would be an appropriate statement. Nowhere did I say anything about talking to the man with the guns or anything.

Also, I mentioned Iraq. So possibly the Afghanistan remark has merit, but then again you know in the context of the statements made it doesn’t. The culture in Afghanistan and what they would take arms against their government for in respect to fighting against tyranny and what the citizens of the United States would take up arms about are vastly different. You are mixing discussions though.

Always has and always will. To a degree. A gun is a tool, and just like any other tool, requires a human to operate. Native americans definitely got screwed, but how can you say that if they’d had no guns, they would’ve fared better?? This argument is so much more multifaceted than you’re making it. That’s like saying, well there’s plenty of food in (the mansions in) pre-revolutionary France, so why were people hungry?

The overwhelming consensus of scientists hasn’t convinced you that global warming is occurring, by which I mean global warming caused by human factors, such as carbon emissions. I’m sure you know that public opinion is swinging in the direction of giving credit to global warming. Now I’m just going to take a guess about your intentions. Do you think that if global warming is less accepted, Bible-believing Jesus worshipers will be more influential in American society? Oh, that’s right, you’re probably not used to my warm and congenial writing style. I mean Bible-believing Christians.

I know, but posting here is SO MUCH FUN. I just discovered this website today and was almost late to work because I couldn’t stop wrecking this whole comment page. Anti’s arguments are so paper thin, this is like hitting a t-ball. Tell all your gun rights friends to come on here and debate. They are mad weak here!

So, one should first interview a man armed with an assault rifle and acting erratically in a mall and then determine if he won’t mow down shoppers? Gabby Gifford might disagree. You can’t be serious. And if you are serious, then you make a case of false equivalencies that denigrate sane gun owners and weaken the argument for gun ownership. There is no way in hell a court or DA would hold a report under those circumstances false. Your ‘rational’ BS is so apparent and the condescending sincerity in which it is poised, transparent. And BTW, I have lived in Afghanistan, and would testify that every male over the age of twelve has access to a gun. pppfffttt

So guerrilla tactics from people with guns and the will to fight won the freedom from the tyranny of England. Sounds like the same thing I said except you named the fighting tactic that contributed to the success of the fight. Also, you once again make another assumption.

You don’t know what I have an haven’t read already and the only other thing your statement could be doing, besides assuming I haven’t read Sun Tzu, is ordering me to read Sun Tzu and I don’t think you were just ordering some random dude on the internet around.

Perhaps you should not make assumptions so often. I was pointing out that the issues MetalGoddess pointed out were either not of the level in which to expect the people to take up arms against their government or in the case of the Native Americans they did take up arms and lost the fight.

Perhaps you don’t know what scientific fact is. If a fact can be refuted with other evidence then it fails to meet the standards of being fact. There is plenty of evidence that shows that global warming, as a complete concept, is nothing more than just that. A concept.

I didn’t even claim to not believe the concept. I simply stated the concept is not absolute fact. Hence why the term has actually been dismissed for the new term global climate shift by the very people that are what I would consider your side of the debate.

I definitely believe that there are consequences for the various causes of what is coined global warming, but I do not see absolute proof of any sort that those consequences are indeed warming of our global temperatures. There are too many variables in the equation to definitively say that we are not currently in a naturally occurring warming and cooling cycle that has been around since the dawn of time.

Notice I say definitive proof. No definitive proof means no living up to the standard of what is considered a fact.

Yes. Everyone said standard insults slung from anti-gun people towards gun owners. One comment about this person’s penis, one claiming all gun owners have guns because of small penises, and one attacking the intelligence level of a person that the individual doesn’t know. All winning arguments to make when afflicted by the very things mentioned here.

The safety issue can’t be properly addressed. If the weapon wasn’t actually loaded then there was no safety issue. If it was, as long as the gun safety was on then there was no actual safety issue either.

It seems you are the one being a 13-year-old girl, tossing out insults. I didn’t actually say you were claiming to be an expert. Perhaps you should read again. I made a general statement about people such as yourself that speak as if you actually know what you are saying when you don’t.

Here is something ‘smart’. In a conversation, slinging insults is not ‘smart’ or ‘useful’. It is time you take your own advice.

Ya know, the street-racing, backroads drifting enthusiasts could say the same thing: “Nobody died, nobody got hurt… so what’s the big deal?” One time (or even more) with nobody dying doesn’t make something safe.

1: I never said I was an expert, and 2: you’re a jackass who didn’t even address the safety issue; just rolled your eyes and went, “Ugh.. gawsh!” like a 13-year-old girl exasperated with her parents. Head back over to RedState if you don’t have anything useful or smart to contribute.

Range safe carry methods and slung carry methods are much different. If you had the appropriate training on the subject you would know that. You are entitled to your opinion, but it gets old hearing all these ‘experts’ that clearly have, at best, a basic knowledge on the topic.

Funny thing is, for someone who is so pro-gun, who’s just trying to educate people about them, and make them feel less scared, etc, etc… he’s carrying his rifle in an irresponsibly dangerous manner. I was always taught to carry my rifle muzzle up, when not preparing to shoot at something, and it should never be pointing at people or anything I didn’t want to shoot (I.e. the crowds of shoppers walking around a mall). How he seems to have his is a form of combat-carry, which is great if you’re in Afghanistan or Iraq, and need to shoulder your weapon extremely fast because insurgent attacks are common. Not exactly safe nor necessary in a Macy’s in a Utah mall though. Dumbass.

While the point that Hitler took away all the guns is an overstatement, and not one that is just a conservative statement, the truth of the matter is that the intent of the argument doesn’t change.

Estimates of 1 in 7 German Jews being armed keeping Hitler from being able to commit the genocide he committed remain relevant. Is it absolutely true that it would have prevented the genocide? No. It is a theory and one that is based in strong logic formed from relevant assertions.

It depends on the type of tyranny in play. If the government was to start openly using the military against the civilian populace you better believe that guns would protect us from that sort of tyranny.

The Native Americans are a different story altogether. They fought and lost. There is a difference between having the means to defend yourself and using those means unsuccessfully and not having those means at all.

As the persecution of “commies” was supported by the people, your point is of no substance there. Same with the Muslims you claim have been persecuted.

While there are some Muslims that have been detained based on accusations of ties to terrorist organizations, in the United States there has been very little unwarranted persecution to stand up to. I can’t say that all accused citizens have been guilty, but those that have been accused and detained were not swept up without cause.

You know, I think there are verbal versions of that moron here posting “bedwetters” and all that stuff. Semi-automatics carried by civilians are completely out of place in most public areas. They are just ginning up a scuffle.

No. Disgusted with morons and those who defend them. I was around when we didn’t do this, and the Hatfields and McCoys were still taking potshots at each other in the Kentucky woods. No. This guy is simply a moron aching for a fight.

Oddly the law abiding sections of society armed with military grade weaponry in Iraq and Afghanistan just didn’t have that chilling effect. And still don’t. Our government has engaged in their own type of tyranny for hundreds of years and people having guns have never stopped that from happening. When people were being persecuted for being “commies” or being Muslims who hadn’t committed any crimes, where were the guns to fight that off? Hell my Native American ancestors had guns and that didn’t stop them from being massacred. Somehow having guns does not protect from tyranny. Never has and never will.

Having come from a country with much stricter gun control and healthier democratic process, I can say that this complete and absolute bullshit.

it’s worth noting that the conservative cry that “Hitler took away everyone’s guns!” is actually a lie. Strict gun control was imposed by the Allies after World War I. The law was loosened in 1928 before Hitler took power, and loosened significantly more by Hitler’s government in 1938.

Since when has a gun owner defended my freedom of speech? If the government decided to take away my freedom of speech tomorrow I doubt there’s anything you could do about that. Who are you going to shoot?

There are numerous reasons for the 2nd Amendment. I am not here to give you a history lesson as to the reasonings behind it. If you really don’t know and would like to know, then I suggest you actually do the research.

Based on your statements, you are intentionally going to be obtuse about anything I say and I really don’t have the energy to debate with someone having that pure intent. If you have a rational and logical discussion to contribute then I am more than willing to have a back and forth with you, but there is no point in wasting my time on statements such as what you made in your last post.

Right. His carrying an AR-15 should not change anyone’s assessment of the potential risk of the situation. I should be perfectly comfortable standing in his potential line of fire (accidental or otherwise), because it’s the “patriotic” thing to do.

But if the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution is inviolate, why can’t folks bring guns to, say, the presidential inaugural? It’s a public space and the inauguration itself celebrates the U.S. Constitution and the people of the US.

Since you seem to be a knowledgeable pro-arms person, tell me (and please provide a historical background) why there is Second Amendment. I’d like to be educated.

I also have a right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which includes not being put in danger by some unsafe irresponsible gun owner, which this Utah guy appears to be based on where he has his muzzle pointed. The first freaking rule of gun safety is to always assume a gun is loaded and always have muzzle awareness. Fortunately in some states you actually have to prove a modicum of gun safety knowledge before you can buy a rifle or handgun. Looks like Utah is not one of those states.

What sort of weapon is he carrying there? You mention AK-47 which leads me to believe you think that is an AK-47. If you don’t know the difference then perhaps you should assess whether you have the knowledge you should have on the subject before you support change to the laws governing guns.

Nothing about that has anything to do with a gun fanatic. Do you know how many people had a child that accidentally put their vehicle into drive or reverse and struck them with the vehicle today? Accidents happen.

Gun owners have no problem with people stating their opinion. In fact, your right to free speech is probably more staunchly defended by gun owners than those that are anti-gun. What gun owners that I know have a problem with is the ignorance displayed in relation to guns by the majority of the anti-gun crowd.

If you, as an anti-gun supporter, would like to discuss logical decisions on gun control then most gun owners would be more than willing to listen. It is not logical though to scream for banning assault rifles when they account for less than 5% of the shootings and various other demands of the radical anti-gun crowd (literally mean the radicals and not all anti-gun people). Just as not all gun owners are crazy gun nuts, not all anti-gun people are fanatics.

Well other than making a false report to the police, that is your right. He was neither dangerous nor acting erratically. If you wanted to report a man open carrying with unknown intent then that would be appropriate.

I would like to know the reason for my previous statement being voted down though. Was I incorrect stating that this man wasn’t doing anything illegal and that not liking his conduct doesn’t make his conduct illegal? I would say the down vote shows how silly the anti-gun crew mentality is.

I remember tyranny quite clearly in Korea in the sixties…..armed police/ soldiers on every corner and machine gun towers throughout the city. That’s tyranny, not wearing gun accessories while intimidating shoppers at Penny’s.

AdonisArmor is having a delusion based on what? His statements were very rational and logical. Perhaps it is you that needs to seek help understanding the difference between delusion and difference of opinion.

Your statements are false. I was in Iraq and I actually know that not all adult males had at least one gun. Guns can protect us from tyranny. Guns and the will of the people is what won us freedom from the tyranny of England did it not?

There are places you can’t carry. You are making the assumption that actual gun owners believe what you just said. The truth of the matter is that while there are gun owners that may not know the laws, they definitely tend to know the laws much better than the anti-gun people that have never owned a gun.

Ha. Global warming may or may not be happening. There are people that deny global warming is a fact which those that believe in global warming try to claim it is. Don’t claim something is fact that isn’t and you should be fine. Anecdotal evidence is not fact and that is all that there is in relation to global warming whether you are willing to admit it or not.

I know people drive drunk, dickhead, and I expect the state to take them off the road. I also know that there are some people who like to drive juiced up cars at 125 mph on a public highway as a video game, and I expect the state to lock them up and prevent them from driving unsafe vehicles. For the reasona, I want to state to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people and mass murder weapons out of the hands of everybody except specialized law enforcement units. Yeah. I know. Give us the old canzone: Guns don’t kill people. Right. But crazy people with guns kill people. And crazy people with mass murder weapons kill a lot of people. And let’s get off this rank dishonesty: We’re not talking about banning rifles or ordinary handguns — although people like you who demonstrate you can’t think rationally probably ought to be deprived of them.

Not all situations are a 1 to 1 comparison. I didn’t see anywhere that any of the comparisons you suggest were stated by Carl.

Let’s reverse a couple of your comments though. Do you think you are safer by making me reload my AR-15 every 10 rounds instead of 30? Do you think you are safer by making me register my AR-15? Do you think an assault rifle ban, of which would actually only ban the production and sales of NEW assault rifles, will stop assault rifles from existing?

The answer is no. You are having a kneejerk reaction to the terror that the media instills upon you and that reaction makes no logical sense.

I think gun nuts are similar to anyone with a machinery fetish. Harley’s, sports cars, etc. They get off on feel-good objects rather than building their own character, and they tend to be superficial, strident, obnoxious people. The acronym BIRG comes to mind.

Gun zealots tend to be global warming deniers, also. They think everything is a conspiracy against their self-proclaimed “right” to do whatever, wherever they please. Self-centered punks, for the most part. Rebels with too much attitude and few clues about the big picture.

Great point Naja. The reason incidents with cars is increasing is because of a combination of things, but primarily that there are more cars on the road. Same thing with shootings. There are more people in the United States, hence more shootings. The difference is that those willing to use their brains see more shootings in volume, but less percentage per capita.

The true statistics don’t lie folks. Gun violence is down. Don’t listen to the anti-gun crowd’s statistics. Simply put, the statistics given by the anti-gun crowd are false. Do the research yourself. Fact check the anti-gun crew yourself. You will easily identify that their agenda is to instill fear into you through lies and misrepresentation of the facts.

You can see this misrepresentation even in the proposal from the President. He goes as far as claiming that 22% of 14-17 year olds have witnessed a shooting. Does that even remotely get close to making sense to anyone? I would be willing to bet that even at schools where there have been shootings you wouldn’t find 1 in 5 students that witnessed the shooting. That is just a simple taste of the false information you are being fed.

Who wants to feel like he’s shopping in a Penney’s in downtown Damascus? I grew up watching “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman,” “Have Gun, Will Travel,” and all the other classic TV westerns, the moral of which shows was: in the bad old days everyone carried a gun and there was always trouble, now because of Sheriff This or Marshall That, we’re more civilized and you can walk down the street without worrying that some creep is going to walk out and pull a gun on you. Apparently the bad old days are back and the creeps are back with them.

One point that the majority of you fail to see is that while this is misguided, nobody died. Nobody was shot. Nobody was hurt in any sort of way. It supports the assertion that guns are not the problem. Those guns he carried didn’t just randomly start killing people. Neither did the guy.

As another poster commented, the people screaming about guns must be scared of guns. They have no knowledge of guns, but the media has instilled mass amounts of fear in them. For no good reason. As cliche as it to say, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. If the intent is to kill, the method to do so is absolutely irrelevant.

Also, those scared of assault rifles and supporting their ban; check the statistics. Assault rifles are responsible for less than 5% of the shootings. As another statistic, most states actually have equal or more murders with shotguns than assault rifles.

Instead of fearing guns, and trying to rationalize tragic events by blaming guns, start putting the blame where it should be. Terrible people doing terrible things. Plain and simple.

You’re not very bright, are you? I’ve shot a .22 and .410 shotgun. That’s the limit of my experience with them, but there you go. Wasn’t at all afraid of them, especially when my dad was right there, keeping an eye on me, as I was only twelve or so. Frankly, guns just don’t impress me. In any way, shape, or form. I thought it was fun, shooting at a target, and trying to get off the best shot possible, but once my dad said “time to go”, well, I may have just been told my Little League practice was over, and mom had dinner waiting at home.

No, guns do not scare me at all. No more fear of that object than I have of a fragile glass Christmas ornament. However, many of the people who own guns, and the way they fetishise them, in a most unhealthy manner, now that gives me pause for concern.

Speaking of unhealthy, it would seem, judgeing by the ginned-up, irrational reaction to the rather timorous proposals by gun-control advocates, and Mr. Obama’s laughable follow-up, that a significant number of gun owners do in fact need the assistance of a mental health professional. I’m not going to hold my breath, tho’, as that likelihood is about as remote as a vacation to Betelguese.

The Patriot Act has already made confiscation the law of the land. All they have to do is make sure the word ‘terrorism’ appears somewhere on the paperwork. They don’t seem to care much about that though.

I’d assume that the JCP is considered to be private property. Post a sign “No firearms permitted” and then call the SWAT team the next time one of these guys shows up. Clearly, if this was some deranged guy, you’d be dead before you could say “excuse me, sir, but guns aren’t allowed here”.

If folks think that it’s okay to open (or concealed) carry a firearm anywhere the public is allowed, I’d suggest that they try it at, oh, say the local airport or federal courthouse.

Not to mention, over the last 100 years, we have innovated a thousand different ways for making cars are safer. They’ve added low-speed impact bumpers, seat belts, air bags, head rests with neck protections, safety cage construction, crumple zones, pedestrian-deflection, roll-over protection, fuel cut offs, better tire and brake materials, safety glass windshields, etc… the automotive industry has done many, many things to make cars safer to operate. Cars are safer today than they have ever been in history. The main reasons why statistics consistently show an increase in incidents with cars is because of a combination of a more and more cars on the road, and inadequate infrastructure to accommodate so many vehicles safely. What has the firearms industry done to make its product safer for everyone, users and non-users alike?

Here is a thought, if skillet is going to bring a weapon such as this into a public, the police or other security should have the authority to check the weapon to confirm (for public safety), to make sure there is not a round in the chamber. If there is the weapon should be confiscated.

That’s interesting to hear. So, torture and warrantless wiretapping, elimination of habeas corpus, etc. is the same as you having to reload your AR-15 every 10 rounds, rather than 30? Or having to register your guns? Or not being able to buy assault rifle-style weapons? “But registration leads to confiscation!” That’s interesting because those other rights are actually being eroded, the rights you’re freaked out about are only eroding in your head.

1) Cars have the capability to kill, they are not exclusively designed to kill. And before you start with knives, hammers, etc. as killing machines, please explain why we don’t arm our military and police with those things as their PRIMARY weapon. Why guns? What’s special about them? They’re all equally dangerous right? You’d much rather be in a fight with a person with a hammer than a Sig, right? If not, why not?
2) The utility of the car outweighs the negative impacts. The same can’t be said for private citizens owning guns.
3) We want to ban assault rifle-style weapons (notice I did not say assault rifles- I know the difference), not rifles. Very few serious people have proposed that (and name the politicians who have). You want your hunting shotgun, have at it.
4) We have lots of rules around who can drive, required insurance, training, safety standards for cars, areas where cars are not allowed, speed limits. If you’d like to subject yourself to the same kind of laws, I’m happy to discuss.

If we could just figure out a way to have designated “open carry” areas where they could go play “I’m Mr. Macho” and sane people could avoid. That way, when they do all “stand their ground” they can hopefully kill each other off, leaving the country safer for the rest of us.

Sooner or later these idiots are going to find themselves facing another person carrying concealed, who draws on them, and either commands that they drop to the floor or be shot, or just shoots them first, on the assumption they are about to use the gun to kill others in the store. Why? Because carrying a gun like that in public is NOT acceptable, it is NOT safe, it is the act someone whose disconnect from reality verges on complete. They are a danger to themselves, and to everyone around them.

In the picture, he is carrying it like he’s a little old lady with a big purse. Anyone could walk up behind him and grab it, and it offers him absolutely no control. Not to mention, how would you feel being that guy next to him with the muzzle pointed at you?

I carry a gun every day and I can honestly say I’m not afraid of much. The only fears I have are the same as yours, that a family member might get sick, our economic security, a sudden accident. I have insurance for that stuff, which is all a gun is. Insurance against the unknown.

Ibmiel is exactly right, just a bunch of bedwetters afraid of shadows. How can you possibly drive a car? You know people speed, drive drunk, high as a kite or on the phone. And the odds are you’ll be in a car accident once every five years. It’s extremely unlikely you’ll ever get shot. Another thing that I wonder about is why you want to ban rifles? 87% of all shootings are handgun related.

It is not a right. There was no purpose in the carry of a rifle and a hand gun. My mindset is just as important as his right to a gun but not to carry it to intimidate and scare people. Get your $1.50 from the NRA and piss off.

Right, a bunch of open-carry yahoos with no combat training-paper targets in well lit conditions don’t shoot back-are exactly who will save the day against a rampaging gunman, no chance the armed civilians would hit fleeing bystanders instead of the gunman, nope, every shot will hit the perpetrator, and the would-be rescuers will be hoisted on the shoulders of the grateful survivors with many a “huzzah” ringing out.

There’s no point to having a gun unless you have it with you at all times, but understand, it’s much more likely the gun will be used because the person is aggravated, think of the driver who cut you off, or to “teach that guy a lesson” as opposed to stopping a massacre.

Yes, by carrying a gun as concealed or open, you’re acknowledging some fundamental/ significant level of fear- the gun makes you feel safe. Of course, the price of your perceived safety is lots of dead people. Obviously not you directly, but your attitude that guns make people safer.

That’s the thing. The evil side of me would be thrilled if a large number of black people started engaging in open and concealed carry, especially in groups. Add some camouflage or quasi military uniforms like these yokels do and the people who are so adamant about their guns rights and it’s our fault that we’re uncomfortable would completely lose their sh*t.

Not scared of guns, scarred of the people that carry them as concealed or open. . You’re essentially saying, “I live in fear, so I need this gun to make me feel safer.” All this talk about not letting the terrorists win, and guess what? They’ve won as far as you’re concerned. If you open carry, you’re also saying, “I believe the conspiracy theories,” which makes you dangerous. Fearful people who believe the conspiracy theories do bad things.

I carry a gun everyday, and I feel pretty good. But it has nothing to do with the mere defensive tool at one’s side. It’s that I have the intelligence and forethought to prepare myself for the unknown. When you see a gun, your adverse reaction isn’t based on me being responsible, it’s on your own fear that you are being irresponsible and unprepared. So you expect society itself to rush and protect you, as if such fallacies were even possible.

Just like many would rein in that stupid right to free speech. Wow, has that thing gotten out of control, just people saying what ever they will, all willy nilly. Spouting off at 600 words per minute. Scaring errbody.

Not directly. But the atmosphere of law abiding sections of society armed with military grade weaponry has a chilling effect on tyranny. Whether that be a policeman beating someone to death, or Federal agents kidnapping and torturing people. You will find an increase in a country’s governmental abuse and corruption as your weapon laws increase, generally.

I believe in all of your rights, even as you believe that you can pick and choose which ones to “allow” me. I care for you as a person, even as you would unwittingly and unknowingly have me enslaved. Just think about it.

Oh.my.god. I just figured it out. I’m sitting here reading all these comments, flabbergasted at the stupidity, ignorance, idiocy, and delusional thinking you all exhibit, and it just popped into my head. You are all scared of guns! They terrify you, I can’t believe it took me this long to realize it. Scared to death of guns, that is hilarious!! You know why you are scared?? Because you see guns as evil, the instruments of killers. They are inanimate objects, like a knife, a baseball bat, a tire iron, a frying pan, there’s nothing evil or bad about them. What needs to happen for all y’all to get over your fear is to be around guns more often. You need to get to know people who conceal/carry. They aren’t nuts, they know a gun is just a tool, a tool that has saved innumerable lives. A tool used by police, soldiers, government agents, body guards, private security firms to PROTECT people. This is so awesome, I can’t wait to tell people, don’t worry guys, we’ll help you get over this gun phobia. :)

Wrong, businesses wouldn’t dry up. The businesses would be glad they were there, they would realize no one is going to rob them with a bunch of armed citizens around. You guys do realize that criminals do NOT want anything to do with armed bystanders, the criminals run the other way. The very LAST thing they want is to be confronted by an armed bystander. They specifically choose gun free zones. Come on, use your logic and reason. People would still go to the malls, they would get used to seeing armed shoppers, they would be exposed to guns being used the right way, not the way criminals use them. They would get used to seeing armed good guys and get over their fear. Guns are tools, inanimate objects, they aren’t bad or evil. I just cannot stop laughing. Wow, you guys should have said something, should have told us gun owners that you were afraid of guns. Any gun owner would be more than happy to help you get over your phobia. Man, I cannot wait to tell everyone I know. This is going to spread so fast! Don’t worry, we’ll help you guys get past this. :)

The truth is, it honestly doesn’t matter if he is safe and responsible or not, it is his right. It doesn’t matter if he’s ex-military or ex-whatever or trained at all. Regardless of how you “feel” or how anyone else “feels”, it is the right of every American. White, black, straight, gay, it is a RIGHT. And it’s time it was said.

Also, you are correct in assuming that every stranger you meet is a potential threat. I just happen to trust the majority of my fellow Americans. I think that the overwhelming majority of people are good at heart. What about you?

Please don’t tell me you actually believe the “guns protect us from tyranny” bullshit? Every adult man in Iraq had at least one gun. That didn’t protect them from the tyranny of Saddam or the US military. Every adult male in Afghanistan had at least one gun. It hasn’t protected them from the tyranny of the US military. If the government decides to move against you, all your popguns aren’t going to help you. That is just a juvenile fantasy.

Without being psychic, how is anyone to know whether or not a heavily armed person walking into a mall “knows how to safely and responsibly operate those weapons” or is there to shoot up the place (not that those options are mutually exclusive)?

Indeed, it would be foolish for anyone not to assume that this person was a potential threat.

We need more morons like this parading their manhood around. Only when they drag their AK-47 through the grocery store checkout and people run screaming from the store will we get guns out of society. And, yes, the New Black Panthers and, for that matter, all brown and black people need to apply for weapons take lessons, pass the tests, and start walking around with their armaments proudly displayed. Right then and there, the average NRA-baboon will realize his game is up.

I despise the NRA and am not a member. I am also an open carry advocate and gun rights defender. Did your head just explode? I also don’t understand why a liberal’s first reaction to anything having to do with guns is penis-related? I have experienced very few, if any, penis-related comments among conservatives concerning guns and am wondering if the images of penises occupy your minds constantly, or just when something vaguely phallic, yet unrelated, is shown? Which is, all the time. Nothing wrong with that, just wondering, why the penis/gun obsession? Is it the last refuge of a flopping, dying argument that guns are somehow inherently evil, that you must pathetically resort to ad hominem attacks ad nauseum? So incredibly sad.

Wow. All this hate for someone just exercising a natural human right that many people have fought and died for. How is he an “asshole” or a “jerk”, you fucking twats? How has he hurt anything but your delicate little mindset? “But, but..we’re scared.” Doesn’t matter if you’re scared. That doesn’t trump someone else’s rights. He is ex-military and knows how to safely and responsibly operate those weapons. I believe in freedom, the freedom to date and marry whomever you wish. The freedom to put whatever you choose into your body. The freedom to not be a country at war in perpetuity. And most importantly, the freedom to own and carry (for all to see), the only tools that protect our rights and can defend us from tyranny. It’s time for you all to expand your consciousness a little and to think outside of the tiny liberal or conservative boxes you operate in.

Maybe this guy is on to something. These people and the politicians who love them understand dollars more than sense. If a small, well-regulated militia of armed shoppers started gathering regularly in these malls, business would soon dry up. I wonder which American right (rite?) would fall first–the right to carry a death machine or the right to unbridled capitalism. In any case, this guy only helps the cause of the sane. If only those in charge were capable of reason and the slightest modicum of embarrassment….

… and the next guy who does the same thing will ‘surprise us all’ when he starts shooting indiscriminately… and we’ll all lament the fact that there was no way to know that he meant to use his assault weapons in the mall for bad things.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why he wasn’t escorted from the store for simply creating a disturbance. Face it… while it may be ‘not illegal’ to carry those weapons in that manner, it certain is, 1.) abnormal and strange, and 2.) potentially lethal.

I’m pretty sure that if I stood atop a mall bench are started dancing and yodeling, I’d be walked to the door by security… but this guy was not…?? We’re VERY broken.

Without the slightest hint of irony that companies like JC Penneys, as well as Sears, Montgomery Wards, Target, Ames, and other large department stores all used to sell guns – including handguns, but now the companies are left, do not. The block on catalog mail-order guns in the 1960s was one step, but really they stopped because the amount of profit they were making from gun sales was not enough to offset the bad public relations image they had because of it. For companies that wanted to market as upscale, family-oriented, stores it just didn’t make any real sense, so they gave it up in the late 80s.

Chris, your comment reminded me of the unease I felt in the Paris Metro in 1995 when armed military were carrying their weapons. I know the idea was to make Parisians feel safe but having bored young men standing around all day with loaded guns isn’t confidence-inspiring. Of course, I’m from the old “What could possibly go wrong?” school.

Vision another gun toting citizen seeing this man, thinking he is a terrorist, pulls out his legal to carry gun & starts shooting. What if another, I’m in my second amendment right to carry a gun, sees what’s going & he starts shooting. Armed security guards run down & start shooting. And, I believe in the second amendment, citizen runs into the mall sporting goods store, picks up a gun/ammo, runs out & starts shooting. Headline in the news “WAR ! Gunmen take over mall !” Faux news states, “This proves we need more guns to stop gunmen.” NRA, “Move guns would of prevented this.” Texas Congresswoman Louie Gohmert, “Automatic assault weapon would have stopped this.” (sarcasm)

We can expect a lot more of this behavior. Remember the town hall meetings not long ago where the gun nuts showed up with assault rifles and handguns and not a thing was done. We are really a society of twisted individuals. Where does one draw the line, how does one stay safe. Whether he had a permit to carry or not what was the purpose other that to scare the shit out of people and maybe cause a shoot out with an equally screwed up nut job. Have we regressed so much as a society that this is going to be common place and anyone without a gun is put into being afraid and rush out to buy their own guns. More importantly how do the cops handle this continued risk to themselves and the citizens at large.

Why do gun obsessives think they’re the only ones with a right to a say about what they may do with their guns? The Second Amendment doesn’t go anywhere near that far, even in its most delusional recent reading by the Supreme Court. Hell, I drive a car. I might like to drive 125 miles an hour and blow everybody else off the road for the hell of it, but the government won’t let me. Aren’t they taking away my liberty? And what’s next? Are the black helicopters coming to confiscate my car?

i thought that in states with these ‘carry’ laws a business owner could post ‘no guns allowed’ at their entrances to stop this sort of behavior. that’s the case here in NC anyway. It comes down to you having a right to carry your gun, but no place of business letting you come inside with it.

The difference between soldiers home on leave and this guy are:
Soldiers are trained in the use and maintenance of their weapons; this guy . . . probably not.
Soldiers are sworn to defend the nation; this guy is sworn to defend no one, not even himself.

If I saw a jerk like that parading through a department store carrying his guns, I would make a quick exit from the store and the mall. I don’t trust the stability of anyone who feels the need for this kind of in-your-face behavior.